And now, barely a week later, and therefore just in time to add to her well-deserved publicity buzz, MaryLee has won the Jean Leiby Chapbook Award for 'The Rug Bazaar', which I assume will lead to its publication in the Florida Review. If you can't read the small print in the image above, here's the Judge's commentary:

The Rug Bazaar is a duet of stories, both of which concern American women traveling in Turkey. Both are love stories, and both seem to fly in the face of everything you'd think a love story could be. These are independent stories, yet, as a pair, they harmonize. In music, we might call this "call and response," how one instrument follows another, and, in following, comments on the first. I'll leave it to the reader to pick the order in which these two pieces might best be read. But, surely, read them both! Much of the beauty of TheRug Bazaar is to be found in the way each story complements the other.

The award is no fluke, and it's not her first. MaryLee earned a Masters Degree in English/Creative Writing way back in the 70's but drifted away from writing as the demands of life intervened. Once her children were out of the house and finished with college, she returned to full-time writing. You can read her full bio here.

Montpelier Tomorrow has debuted to high praise from readers. As a caregiver herself, MaryLee knows her subject from the inside. As she says,

I ... never thought that ALS would be a subject I would come to know so well. ... Any caregiver, for any long-term debilitating disease, will recognize her or himself in these pages; but, this is not a diary, nor is it autobiographical. I hope it is, as Wordsworth said of poetry, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

Well said, MaryLee. As the sages declare, we make our own "luck", and I have no doubt that the 'alignment' of the ALS Ice Bucket buzz and the release of Montpelier Tomorrow was meant to be.

It's called a Fourteener because each line of the couplet is made up of just fourteen syllables with seven 'feet' or 'beats' using a style called 'Iambic Heptameter.' And I call it 'tight-rhymed' because in addition to a rhyme that links the two fourteen syllable lines at the end, each line has an internal rhyme at beats two and four. Okay, enough technical talk. Check the post linked to above for more description and examples.

An exciting (for me) epiphany happened about six weeks ago when I started working on a light-hearted rhyme honoring the poetic achievements of Dr. Seuss. The project took an unexpected turn when I realized that these tight little poetic gems usually meet the 140 character limit required as a tweet. Here is how that whimsical rhyme turned out--somewhat of an ode to Twitter:

Fed Dr. Seuss some Twitter juice. A silly song he sung

As viral toads on spiral roads snatched Hashtags with their tongues.﻿

As you can see in the example up top, I can usually also fit a title and my chosen hashtag, #tightrhyme14 within the Tweet.

For me this is great fun, but it's also a good way to stretch those writing muscles. It's a serious challenge to fashion 140 characters of prose into 'Flash Fiction'. Good flash fiction tells a complete story while leaving much territory for the reader's imagination to roam. And, of course, the added challenge of incorporating rhyme and meter makes it quite a mind-stretching exercise.

Here's another 'Flash Fiction' Fourteener - this one in the Sci-Fi genre:

Time Travel Man--his risky plan: "I'll kill my young self first.

"New me's that roam the quantum foam will rise from bubble burst."﻿

Instead of telling a story, a good Fourteener couplet could be like a proverb--a self-contained gem of wisdom. Here are a couple of examples I recently tweeted:

If you are looking for more of these ... well, try my seven-book epic Fantasy/Sci-Fi novel series 'Eden's Womb'. It features one of these Fourteeners as an epigraph at the start of each of its more than 300 chapters. An epigraph presages or comments on the content to follow. Here's a pair of them, which introduces Book One, 'The Return of Naja'. Naja is a long-missing Goddess who makes some big claims:

Men knew me not. Those fools forgot the Eye that opened first -The voice that spoke when time awoke and Heaven's water burst'Midst raging void, ere dark destroyed, 'twas I who stooped to nodGave form to place o'er waters' face ... and made their precious God.

﻿

Writing these little nuggets can be frustrating at times. Imagine spending hours agonizing over a single 140 character Tweet. But the reward, when the wording suddenly falls into place, is immeasurable--a sense of hard earned accomplishment: A mountain climbed on trails that rhymed, a lofty peak achieved ... the sudden gleam of self esteem can scarcely be believed!
Uh-oh! Here I go again ...

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Deep and intensely captivating from the first page, ‘Conversations among
Ruins’ is a semi-autobiographical psychological thriller/drama/romance
composed of two distinct parts: the deterioration of, and the redemption
of Daniel Stavros.

I fell in love with part one quickly. The
imagery is powerful, the narrative drive compelling, and the language
wonderfully lyrical. Before moving into more detail I want to provide
an example of Peters’ vibrant style:

“His uneasiness changed to
anger. He stared at Gail’s raven hair and pale skin, the contrast of
dark and light like chiaroscuro or a lunar eclipse. Gail had always
seemed mysteriously beautiful, somehow high in the sky above him,
casting shadows. But she, too, existed in darkness. He wondered how
long he’d stay blinded by her silhouette.”

Daniel Stavros is a
professor at a small university who has both an out of control drinking
problem and a mood disorder that seems rooted in his difficult childhood
and his aberrant relationship with his troubled mother, Sarah.

The
tale opens in a detox ward. We learn that Daniel, though in utter
denial and fiercely determined to continue his self-destructive path, is
in danger of losing his job. Arriving in the institution is Mimi,
young and overtly carefree daughter of a wealthy lawyer. Here begins an
intense, sometimes dysfunctional romance that abets Daniel’s downward
spiral.

Peters’ writing is richly descriptive. We do not just
witness Daniel’s descent into utter depravity, we live it. We feel what
Stavros feels. We understand his pain. Mimi is not without her own
similar troubles, but hers are more in control. So she is there with
him, propping him up as he descends, until at last she becomes his only
link to sanity.

And then she dumps him.

Part two, though
not formally identified as such, begins when Stavros’ empathetic boss
hands him a key to an isolated mountain cabin during a poignant scene in
which Daniel barely clings to reality.

Or perhaps he doesn’t.
Part two is figurative and surreal. There is an almost Alice in
Wonderland quality to the succession of scenes—a flow that feels like an
amusement park ride.

Where will the ride stop? Will the roller
coaster derail? Well, I can’t divulge that, of course, but I assure you,
the ride is worth the price of admission.

Jeff Alt hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1998 for a cause near to his heart. His severely handicapped brother, unable to communicate or care for himself because of cerebral palsy, had to be institutionalized when the family could no longer care for him. The institution they finally settled on, Sunshine Inc. of Maumee, Ohio, proved to be a first class resource, and Jeff sought to help raise money to support their work.

He tirelessly worked toward a goal of raising $10,000 as he trained for his hike. He had not achieved the goal when he set out on his Appalachian Trail adventure, but by the time he finished he had raised over $15,000.

The good cause aside, this is a book written by a young man with a warm, open heart and a wonderful low-key sense of humor. Example: not long after being chased out of a pasture by an angry bull and ignominiously falling on his face in front of drive-by hecklers as he clambered over the stile and out of the field, he pulled out his lunch, which was a roast beef sandwich, and "savored every bite with symbolic pleasure."

The book seems written and edited by amateurs. There are some basic spelling and usage errors (e.g. 'stile' in the story above is spelled 'style'). This is particularly noticeable during the first third of the book - to the point that it was a bit distracting. But the writing significantly improved through the middle and the end. It is as if Alt was growing as a writer, but did not take the time to go back to the beginning and revise.

In the end the book completely won me over because of its content and personality. The story of his hike was peppered with heart warming vignettes, the humor hit its stride by the middle of the book and kept going, and the simple selfless warmth of the story teller shined through on nearly every page. It is a worthwhile read for anyone, and one of the better Appalachian Trail hike memoirs.

"Not all who wander are lost." -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Welcome. Here is a site about traveling the old fashioned way—on foot.

“…the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day."

— Henry David Thoreau

For me, purposeful walking lies at the heart a well-lived life. Walking defines us as a species. We are the ape who left the trees to explore the world. Walking made us curious and adaptable, which led to tool making, agriculture, community, and perhaps to the point of forgetting that it was our two feet that got us here. In myself I find the purest peace experiencing this world in the simple way of our distant ancestors.

“
…walk in a way that … print[s] peace and serenity on the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet."

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I started this blog after I retired from NASA, so that family could follow my bucket-list treks. I’m still trekking. See the ‘Hopping Rocks’ tab for details. Sharing the joy of my walks just amps up the joy-meter. This is a labor of love.